My problem
I discovered that on the Gmail address I use to manage the Gadgetisimo.ro site I’ve piled up 368 unread messages. I knew there were a lot, but not quite that many. Well, on my personal one I have over 1,100.
Where do so many come from on this address? Well, newsletters from various tech sites or from those whose products we use here, offer after offer, admin info sent by Disqus, Google Search Console, hosting… that kind of stuff where you read the subject in the notification and realize it’s not in the “everything’s on fire” category. I’ll just read them tonight while I’m watching a movie. Yes, I can do that, because I gave up Netflix and now I get ads for back pain pills.
All that was left was to hit the books and study the AI Toolkit. And that’s how I came up with the prompt below:
I’m a very busy person. Right now I have 368 unread emails. Do a thorough analysis of them and advise me what to do
And who should I give access to my particularly important and secret emails? To Google, of course, since it knows them anyway. I hope you don’t believe the nonsense like “Nooo, we never look, God forbid, how could you think that?” 😏
What Gemini did for a busy person
OK, so I set up the Gemini account on this address. I chose Deep Research, the free version, and set Google Search and GMail as sources.
To begin with, it asked me to connect Gemini ➡️ Workspace, probably to get access to the messages.
It proposed the following plan, giving me the option to modify it.
- Research available data
- Analyze results
- Create report and solutions
I accepted its proposal, because what was I supposed to change in a plan with 3 clear points?
The report exported as a document on Drive
After an intense 6 minutes of work, it produced the miracle report. The report was displayed in the browser, with the option to export it as a document to Drive.
The report is quite professionally done and is divided into two sections.
In the first section it provides a summary of the unread messages. It takes senders into account and basically gives me a fairly comprehensive overview of what they say. The summary is not a dry “it says this and that”. On top of that, it also tells me why I should take certain messages into account (for example those from Google Search Console), even creating a list of priorities.
On the other hand, for promotional messages from the maker of a plugin used here, it does an analysis of the offers, grouped by time of year and discount level. Then it tells me “yes, they’re already expired, but here’s what I found: the biggest discounts, 70%, are in summer.”
In the second section it presents tips on how not to end up in this situation again: filters, bulk archiving, analyzing whether it’s worth keeping certain subscriptions, automatic or at least manual organization based on priorities, or even implementing an AI system to do all this. If I were to go non-AI, Gemini estimated, taking into account the current volume, that fifteen minutes a day dedicated to email would be enough.
Interactive infographic as an HTML file
From the report created by Gemini you can generate a web page, which is actually an interactive infographic.
Quiz to test your knowledge
From the same report we can generate a quiz. In it you can check whether you correctly understood what Gemini says in that hefty report, like a PhD thesis. It even has footnotes.
Helpful flashcards
A game also for checking your knowledge. You click on the front of the card with the question and the card flips, showing the answer. WTF, the busy person has time for this kind of childish stuff, Gemini?
Audio summary of the report
Generating it took almost as long as the actual analysis. The audio summary is very natural. Both in voice and content. It’s not that “robot” voice and the style is very “human”, being, in fact, a discussion between two people.
Conclusions
My expectations were that it would tell me what to do with the 368 messages and how to organize things in the future so I don’t end up in this situation again.
I’m satisfied with both results. Overall I didn’t learn anything new about what to do going forward; it was more of a psychological thing. “Come on, don’t jump off the roof, it’s fixable.”
But the synthesis in the first part really was a surprise. Both pleasant and useful.
Will I set it to work on the 1,100 on my personal address as well? Definitely yes.
Sources: Photo by Yan Krukau
